because the world has failed us
by spencer99mirror
Summary: Chloe, the world's end, and what she does about it. ["Pandora" timeline] [gen]


**1.**

Clark leaves, not long after Lois vanishes.

Chloe tries not to feel betrayed.

Clark looks at her and sees her cousin, and his face fills with pain and remorse. Eventually, he stops looking at her altogether.

She tries not to feel hurt.

 **2.**

She lies awake the night Clark leaves, in a cocoon of blankets that smell of mothballs and sweat, and listens to Oliver argue with Clark outside the back door.

"That's it? You're just walking out on us? Just like that?" Oliver's words are clipped and she thinks he might be smiling, the smile of his that leaves his eyes hard and angry.

"You don't understand." Clark's voice, tired.

"No, I guess I don't. 'course, I don't abandon my friends and run off with my tail between my legs either."

There's a thud against the boarded up window and a pained grunt, then quiet for so long Chloe starts getting anxious.

Then – "I'm _sorry_ , Oliver. I – I can't – this is something I have to do by myself. Alone."

"What about the others?"

"Look after them. Especially Chloe."

Chloe presses a hand over her mouth and blinks back involuntary tears.

"I will," Oliver says, his voice gone low and soft. "Take care of yourself, Clark."

A single set of footsteps crunching on gravel, moving away down the alley.

Oliver comes in five minutes later and lies down beside her. He drapes an arm over her hip and entwines his fingers with hers, his body warm against her back.

Chloe lies awake in the dark long after Oliver is softly snoring. She stares at the mildewed wallpaper and makes plans.

 **3.**

They lose A.C. He goes out for food one day and doesn't come back.

The next morning Oliver arrives, his face hard, and says the Kandorians have lashed A.C's broken, bloody body to a telephone pole and seared the Mark of Zod into his chest as a warning.

Oliver and Victor disappear from the shelter that night and Chloe finds herself struggling against the waves of panic that threaten to overwhelm her. _They will come back._

The red sun has gone down and the red moon is rising before Oliver and Victor return with A.C's body.

They can't bury him in Metropolis – there's too much chance the feral dog packs roaming the streets would dig him up, anyway – so they burn the body in the alley behind the building.

Chloe thinks about how A.C. hated heat.

The body shrivels up and blackens like paper applied to a open flame.

It's the first and the only time she sees Victor cry.

It's the last time she allows herself to cry.

 **4.**

They get out of Metropolis because Chloe says they should.

Getting past the Kandorian patrols and checkpoints takes all of Chloe's planning skill and Oliver and Victor's combined fighting power.

"Why the country?" Oliver asks.

"It's easier to find food."

"More ground to cover," Victor points out.

"Which also means more places to hide," Chloe says. "And there are still pockets of people hiding out there. We're going to need them."

"What for?" Victor asks, raising an eyebrow.

"The resistance," Chloe says.

Oliver asks her if she's kidding.

She's not.

 **5.**

It takes them three days to walk to Smallville. Victor, with his cybernetic enhancements, could have done it in one but he paces himself alongside Oliver and Chloe. They've agreed to stick together.

Smallville looks like a war zone.

Zod's set up headquarters in the now heavily fortified Luthor mansion.

The Kent farm has been turned into a gulag.

 **6.**

More people join them as the weeks go by; mostly human, but several with kryptonite induced abilities as well. The Kandorians offer any meteor freaks they find a chance to join their ranks. They kill those who refuse.

 **7.**

Chloe's stockpiled supplies of kryptonite weapons finally come in handy. Oliver's angry that she used his funds and kept it a secret from him. But when she asks him to, he takes Victor and ten others and breaks into the Metropolis train-yards to retrieve the weapons hidden in a special, lead-lined boxcar.

They are only able to carry back a fraction of the kryptonite weapons, and Chloe thinks of the six other stockpiles hidden across the country, frustratingly out of their reach. But she has no time to worry about things that are out of her control.

 **8.**

A young woman with rounded shoulders and a pinched face pleads with them to let her come along on a raid so she can find her husband.

Someone tosses her a knife but misjudges the distance, and it should cut her but the blade bounces off her skin instead.

"Kandorian," Chloe says coolly.

The woman draws herself up, sneering, and opens her mouth.

One kryptonite bullet, fired from a customized revolver, right between her eyes. She topples over with a confused look on her face. Even Kandorians bleed red.

"Bury the body under the rubbish heap," Chloe says, eyes fixed on the corpse. "So no wild animals will dig it up."

They start screening anyone who wants to join the resistance by nicking their palm with a sharp blade to see if they bleed.

 **9.**

They lose Victor.

 **10.**

Oliver tells people they meet, "Come with us if you want to live" and acts like it's funny.

Oliver smiles, and smiles, and even Chloe has a hard time telling when he's faking now.

She thinks Oliver is trying to stay sane the only way he knows how.

 **11.**

Crouched on the roof shingles on the roof of Zod's mansion, Chloe tugs her black knit cap lower on her forehead and drags her scarf up to cover her nose and mouth.

The night air is cold against her clammy skin.

They have a bird's eye view of the tableau playing out beneath the skylight. Clark forced to his knees; the blade glinting in Zod's hand; Lois – and that _was_ a shock – struggling against a guard, mouth open as she calls to Clark.

"Chloe?" Oliver asks, forehead furrowed.

She lifts her chin a fraction and nods.

Oliver leans towards the edge of the roof and signals silently to the others on the lawn.

Chloe keeps her gaze trained on the scene below. Only a second or two elapses before a kryptonite arrow crashes through the bay window and embeds itself in the chest of one of Zod's lackeys.

The ghost of a smile flits across Chloe's face. "That's our cue," she says.


End file.
